The Poseidon Adventure (17 page)

She moved cautiously down the first aisle to her left. Two doors were shut but a third at the far end was open and as she illuminated the room to investigate, she thought she would die of fright.

Within, overhead, an indescribable, heart-stopping 'thing' was coiled as though to pounce upon her. She thought she saw a dead white face, black insect body and not only two arms reaching for her, but tentacles waving snakelike and glittering wickedly in the torchlight. It was so unexpected, so monstrous, so unbelievable, so imminent that her limbs froze and her throat constricted choking off her scream.

Then she was seized from behind in a relentless grip, paralysing her with cold terror. Her light was knocked from her hand, but before it went out it flashed across the monstrous thing on the ceiling, still immobile, and she was aware that it was another pair of arms that had embraced her. She had not heard the soft footsteps or breathing behind her. It was this knowledge that kept her from fainting; this embrace was human. It took her, spun her about and pinioned her down. A hand was forced over her mouth.

She felt herself thrown violently upon her back and with the hand still cruelly pressing her lips to prevent outcry, a body, a something, a someone lay on top of her in such a manner that she was unable to move.

Strangely she was able to separate the two horrors now; the 'thing' from the ceiling and that other pressing her down, imprisoning her limbs and her will. She felt helplessly immobilized not only by the one holding her but by the weight of the darkness itself enveloping her. A hand tore at her underclothes and not until she felt the sharp internal pain did she understand that she had been pierced and entered -- was being violated, abused, defiled and taken.

Oddly enough the word 'rape' never entered her mind. She was aware only that something was being done to her and that she was powerless to move or cry out, helpless from hurt and the awful indecency of the jostling. The smothering hand pressed so hard that she felt her teeth cutting into her lips. Darkness, evil and pain!

The agony continued. She wanted to shed tears like a child who is being beaten, but could not. Sounds reached her ears but not like any she had ever heard before; hardly human but frightening in their intensity and so, in the end, she could only lie there filled at last with knowledge and recognition, wondering when he would have done with her.

The sounds and the movements ceased and the body still lay upon her. The physical pain diminished but transferred itself to somewhere within her being at her very centre, an anguish of grief. The hand was removed from her face but she no longer cared about or even thought of calling out or giving vent to any kind of cry. She was lost; the blackness was a bottomless pit into which she was falling, falling, from which she would never rise again. She was not aware that her arms were no longer pinioned either, or that the person on top of her had relaxed. Unconsciously she moved her hand. It came into contact with the torch. Her fingers closed over it and hardly knowing what she was doing, she snapped on the light and illuminated the face above her.

It was almost that of an infant, a fair-haired young boy of no more than eighteen, and perhaps this was to her the greatest shock of all. For while during the turmoil of what was being done to her in the darkness she had not been able to form a picture at all of the doer, nothing that might have come to her mind had done so, but only an all enveloping effluence of beastliness. And here was only this flushed youth, sandy-haired with light blue eyes, a curiously touching button of a nose, pink cheeks and an almost feminine curve of mouth.

Why!
She thought to herself in total surprise,
He's only a baby!

'Oi!' said the boy. 'Don't do that. Don't look at me. Ah couldn't 'elp it.'

He lifted himself from her, knelt and fumbled for a moment, took the light from her fingers and turned it upon her. From behind the glare came his horrified whsper, 'Aw, my Gawd! Ah've done it to a passenger! My Gawd! Ah thought you was a stewardess.' He repeated, 'Ah've done it to a passenger! They'll hang me!'

Terror was in his eyes. 'Strike me dead! You're a passenger. Ah've seen you before, when Ah was up on deck on the brass. Ah didn't mean no 'arm to you. Ah thought Ah was goin' to die. There was a skirt and Ah thought Ah'd just 'ave a last bit of it. When you think you're goin' to die, you don' know what you're doin'. But Ah wouldn't 'ave done it if Ah'd known.' And suddenly he laid the torch down, put both his hands to his face and began to weep, not like a man, but as Susan would have wept if she could have done so.

He was so like a child that she soothed, 'Hush! Don't cry so! It's happened. You didn't mean it. I wouldn't tell. No one need ever know. Please don't cry so.'

He could not stop. He was filled with remorse, fear and horror at what he had done, the dreadful, unforgivable transgression, not so much the violation but the line he had crossed.

'There,' Susan heard herself say, 'don't take on so. Come, put your head here for a moment,' and she pulled him down and nestled his head in her arms. It was not any Susan she had ever known before. She could see the tears welling from the light blue eyes, rolling down and staining the pink cheeks and the quivering of the beautifully formed lips. He was so very young and she suddenly so very old that he touched her heart, and she held him and stroked the soft hair and hushed and soothed him until he ceased to cry and lay there nestled.

That other Susan that she did not yet know asked, 'What's your name?'

'Erbert.'

'How old are you, Herbert?'

'Eighteen.

'What are you?'

'Deck 'and, ma'am -- miss.' His replies were half muffled by his face being buried in the material of the frock covering her breast. The dialogue somehow seemed no stranger to him than it was to her. For the moment he was comforted.

'Where do you come from?' Susan had no idea why she was questioning him thus.

''Ull,' he replied.

'Hull?' she repeated. 'Where's that?'

'You know, on the 'Umber, on the north-east coast.'

'Are your parents still living?'

'Mum and Dad? 'Corse! Dad 'as a fish and chip shop. Mum 'elps him out. Me, I couldn't stand the smell of it.'

'Did you run away to sea?'

'Aw no, miss! My Dad ain't like that. I was apprenticed proper. I always go 'ome on leave. They're champion, me Mum and Dad.'

And that last thought appeared to trigger both the enormity and the absurdity of what he had done and where he now was and what was going on, for he suddenly tore himself from her arms and all the tears and childishness had gone from the blue eyes and they were filled with terror again. He sat up, looked at her and cried once more, 'Jesus!! A passenger!' and climbing to his feet, he turned and ran.

Susan called after him. 'No, no, Herbert! Don't be afraid. I'll never tell.' But she heard him slipping and stumbling amongst the pipes and then suddenly a cry and a splash and another cry, and she knew he had fallen down the open well of the staircase and must have hurt himself. She remembered then that there had been an oily film of water and wondered whether it was so deep that he would drown. But it could only have been a few inches, for then she heard more splashing as, in the grip of terror, he ran and ran in senseless and helpless panic, along the dark corridor below until she heard him no longer.

Hurting in every part of her body, within and without, Susan picked herself up off the floor, retrieved the torch and arranged her clothing. She did not bother to examine herself. It was all being done by that other Susan that had been born out of that moment of darkness and with whom she must now get acquainted. She walked painfully to the entrance of the alley and as her torch flashed across it, she was once more picked up by the beam of the big lantern.

She heard her father's voice echoing down the long alley, 'Hello there, Susan! Are you all right?'

She called back, 'Yes.'

'Was there somebody there?'

'Yes.'

'Who was it?'

'A sailor.'

'Did he say anything? Had he seen Robin?'

'No. He was frightened. He ran away.'

The big light switched off. Her father's voice said, 'Keep looking. We're working in your direction. We'll meet you.'

Susan sat upon one of the round valve handles and bent over, her hands folded together between her knees, staring into the darkness.

She knew that she was an old-fashioned person, brought up in an old-fashioned way by a family with old-fashioned ideas.

For the new American revolution, the surging unrest and upheavals of the late sixties had passed the Shelbys by. It had barely touched Grosse Point and left it an enclave of life as it had been lived twenty-five years earlier, as happened in so many communities where the old ways of living were encrusted. Growing up in this atmosphere had been smooth and painless.

Yet the new kind of world revolving just beyond her threshold had impinged upon Susan, coloured her thoughts, desires, emotions and bodily yearnings and she often wondered what she would be like in the end, caught up between changing ideas and customs.

In spite of the new permissiveness and boldness of boys, she had been sheltered during her high-school days by her own fears and fastidiousness. Girls carried contraceptives in their handbags, or took the pill, but the curious obscenity that seemed to connect with these articles and their licence protected her from them. She had understood her own youth, her own body and its values and had not wished anyone yet to take liberties with it.

But she had not been unaware of the higher temperature of the sexual excitement of the times in which she was living. It was her last term at Julia Chandler High School and the following year she would be eighteen and going away to college and later art school at the University of Chicago. She had often wondered whether she would fall in love with and sleep with a boy, shack up or live with him during college years and then marry. Or would she wait, old-fashioned to the end, a shy and virginal bride to be seduced by an understanding husband.

She had placed no particular value upon the concept of virginity. She did not know even if after the strenuous sports in which she had indulged, whether she still was one technically. Sometimes she had an intuitive prescience of what love might be like and felt that she heard it like sweet and distant music. Because of this she was not going to have any spotty adolescent messing about with her for his own entertainment. If some day that music came so close that it would engulf and rob her of all her senses, then she would yield her person without regret and without shame. There would be the excitement of being made into a woman and at the same time beauty. This was, or had been the secret Susan.

Only then did she begin to weep softly to herself. Her dreams, wonderings and longings, the speculations upon what it would all be like had ended in a moment of pain, horror and outrage which, against all that was natural, had suddenly turned to pity. In one instant she had been destroyed and yet had understood and forgiven her destroyer.

She felt chilled through and through, an icy coldness from the crown of her head to her toes and numb as well, as the delayed shock of the experience took over. Yet what seemed to affect her the most was the memory of the frightened boy in her arms and her holding him as one might hold a lover after love was spent.

She heard the others approaching, searching down the side aisles of the long corridor and saw the light from their lanterns flashing this way and that. She blinked the tears from her eyes and automatically returned to her work of looking for her brother.

Yet first she was drawn back to the scene and the first moment of terror she had endured, she had to satisfy herself as to what it had been and the courage to do so was lent her by the knowledge that nothing ever again could hurt her any more.

Once more she picked up the mysterious 'thing' lurking on the ceiling, but this time she recognized it for what it was and verified the recognition by reading the upside-down brass plate identifying the office: 'DENTAL SURGERY. CREW'. The tentacles had been no more than the dentist's drilling paraphernalia hanging from the ceiling and the white arms the dental chair reversed. How difficult it was to remember and to believe in this upside-down world. Would it be equally difficult to orient her own self? Who was she now? What was she? What was left of her old person? What would the new Susan Shelby be like, now that a poor, panicked sailor had used her body and run away?

And she said to herself, as she shone her lamp on doors open and closed and looked into storerooms and tiny offices that had belonged to chief cooks and head stewards and murmured, 'It's incredible, but one behaves in the end just as though nothing had happened.'

Her search revealed no sign of her brother and a third of the way back from the stair-well she joined up with her mother, her father, Rogo and Martin. She and her parents looked at one another, not speaking the question but only miserably and forlornly shaking their heads, while Rogo and Martin stood by in unhappy embarrassment.

CHAPTER XIV

A Rattling of Bones

The party worked its way back again, rechecking, peering behind cases, boxes and bales that had been tumbled from floor to ceiling when the ship keeled over, looking now for a young, dead hand stretched out from beneath some pile, afraid to find it, afraid not to find it, growing more and more fearful of being compelled to face the fact that he was nowhere.

They met once more near the centre of Broadway where they had left the others, the bobbing lights coming together.

'Did you find. . .' Manny Rosen was about to ask, when Belle poked him, 'Don't even ask. Wouldn't they have said so? This is terrible!'

Scott said, 'I'm sorry, Jane, he isn't there. He couldn't have got past us. We've been to the end.'

He said nothing about the gap in the inner wall of the alley and the dark hole at the bottom of it where the lantern had shown unspeakable things floating. Kemal had pointed down and said, 'Boiler -- Boom!'

The second one aft had not exploded, but plunging downward it became wedged in the funnel shaft. There had been no chance of the boy ever reaching it.

They fell silent until Nonnie said, 'But he can't have disappeared, he was such a lively little . . .' and then she cried, 'oh dear!' as Muller squeezed her arm to silence her, for with one exception they were all aware that he could very well have done so.

Rosen asked, 'What about staircases?'

Rogo said, 'There are plenty of those, going both ways.'

'Mightn't he have got up one of those?'

Martin said, 'What, in the dark?'

Belle whispered to her husband, 'Shsh! Don't talk so much, Manny, don't ask so many questionS. Ain't it bad enough without making it worse?'

Susan said, 'I looked down where we came from. There was nobody there. There's about six inches of water now.' She remembered that it had just covered the pipes and Herbert had run splashing away into oblivion.

'Yes,' Scott said, 'in the corridor of "D" deck below. The ship is deeper in the water than she was.'

Rogo said, 'Jesus! She could go any minute, then. What's holding her up?'

Muller said, 'Maybe the cargo and the ballast tanks at either end. Acre said they were empty. She could be flooding In the middle, but . . .'

'Then we ought to be getting the hell out of here,' snapped Linda Rogo. 'If the kid's gone, it isn't our fault. I don't want to drown. If he was anywhere around, he would have hollered, wouldn't he?'

'Yes,' Jane Shelby said, 'you must be getting on, of course.' Her speech, under this provocation, was astonishingly calm. 'All of you, please. I shall stay here until I have found my son . . .'

Susan caught her breath and said, 'But Mother -- you can't!' and realized suddenly that what she was saying was ' we can't'. All the selfishness of youth came welling up in her. For she didn't want to be left behind in that black and forbidding alley with the memory of what had happened to her there. She wanted to escape from it by climbing, going up, rising, reaching for the light, to survive to find other dreams perhaps. She was too young to be condemned to this eternal nightmare of scrabbling about in the dark from which had emerged so swiftly the destruction of the person she had been. She did not want to die.

Scott said, 'You mustn't, Jane. Your boy will be found, I promise you . . .'

' You promise me! Why? How? How do you know . . .? Have you seen him? Do you know something and aren't telling me? Why do you talk like that?'

'Because,' Scott replied, 'he will not be allowed to be lost.' And only Muller realized that his voice had risen a pitch higher and he wondered, were he to flash his torch into the Minister's face, whether that strange glare would be reflected back.

Scott repeated almost as a litany, 'Save the light,' and so used had they become to obeying him that there was a general snapping off of lanterns and torches, except for those carried by Jane Shelby and Scott himself, so that the uneasy party was again shrouded in deep gloom. Scott added, 'We've been spendthrift with our light. From now on we must save every second of it because without, we're finished. I don't know how long it is since these batteries have been renewed. I would think that in a first-class ocean liner, the fire authorities would keep them in proper shape. But this has become a sloppy ship and we just don't know. Therefore I suggest you don't use your torch unless you absolutely must.'

Jane said, 'I'm sorry you feel we've been wasting light. What is it you want to do now? How do you propose to find my boy without it?'

Had Scott been less engrossed in his ends, he might have taken more notice of the edge in Jane's voice and the strain showing in her face, and the disarray caused to her person by the rigours already endured coupled with her anguish.

The Minister misread her, as did all the others, with the exception of Nonnie, who whispered to Muller, 'Oh dear, can't he see? She's going to blow up.'

Scott said, 'I'm afraid we'll have to go on, Jane. We can't remain here any longer if we're to have a chance. We must use every minute. You've seen that the water's rising. And there's another reason.'

Manny Rosen asked, 'What's that?'

'Air,' Scott replied. 'We're trapped inside the hull. We don't know how much oxygen there is, or how long it will last. Haven't you noticed it's hotter? We've got to go on.'

Nonnie whispered to Muller, 'But how can we? Hasn't he any heart?'

Muller said, 'Hush!' and held her more tightly in the shadows outside the circle of yellow torchlight.

Jane Shelby asked, 'And my son?'

Scott replied, 'We'll find him on the way.'

'Brother,' said Rogo, 'I wouldn't be all that sure.'

For the first time it seemed that with an innocent enough remark the detective had got under the Minister's skin, for in a voice again risen in pitch he replied, 'Where's your faith? I've told you, he'll be found.'

Jane declared, 'I'll stay here and look.'

Richard Shelby added, 'Susan and I will stay with you of course, Mother. We won't leave you . . .'

He did not mean it. He did not mean it at all. He did not want to, he did not want either Susan or himself to stay behind in this awful tunnel that already stank of death. Scott had promised they would find the boy. He believed him. He wanted to believe him. If there was a chance that his son was alive or in the vicinity he would not have gone on, but they had searched the alley thoroughly, aided by a police-force detective. Yet if his wife persisted in her decision on the chance that after so long a time he might suddenly reappear, it was their duty to remain by her side. But he could not help himself hating the sacrifice, or thinking of the injustice of it; three more lives for one, Jane, Susan and himself.

Jane knew it as she always had. He would inevitably do the right thing from the wrong motives, the perfect outward man, the male animal, Homo Sapiens Americanus who never put a foot wrong, a clean mind in a healthy body and a heart the size of a pickled walnut in his big chest.

He had loved his son in the same way he had loved her, by all the outward signs; had played football with him, hiked and camped with him, done everything a father should do except love him and understand him. In place of love he substituted pride: pride in his looks and talents as a little reproduction of himself.

Or, thought Jane, for pride substitute vanity. He was vain of his wife, his daughter, his son, his job, success, career, home, friends, his position in the community. Nobody could fault Dick Shelby. He was a great guy with a great family. He had it made, made, made. And she knew that within he was as hollow as that football he so passionately enjoyed throwing about with his son so that one day the boy would garner the same automated cheers that had rung in his own ears on the football field and make him feel even more proud. 'That was Robin Shelby. Dick Shelby's kid. Remember Dick Shelby '49? He had a great pair of hands. The kid's just like him.'

Jane had discovered this a year after their marriage had been celebrated in Detroit with the pomp due a daughter of a motor hierarchy. Young Dick Shelby was known as a comer and her father, Howland Cranborne, President of Cranborne Motors, was wagering Jane on his own judgement that this was so.

As for Jane, she had been in love and had married Shelby of all the young men she had known or at one time or another had cared about, all rather stamped like auto parts from the same mould, because she had felt something vaguely pathetic hidden away within Dick which had excited her compassion.

The love she received in return was compounded of the gamut of Madison Avenue advertising clichés woven around the word. In terms of the 'How To . . .' books, she could not fault his performance in bed. It was his pride to satisfy her, but never his need. Often, when they had done and she was flooded with warmth and tenderness, she would be chilled by the intrusion of the feeling that he was lying beside her as though he expected the door to open and the coach walk in to give him a pat on the back, or Prexy to award him a diploma.

But the real shock of disillusionment had come with the discovery that the pathos she had misjudged as a need lacking in him that she could supply was something quite different. It was nothing but a fear of being found wanting in conformity. His craving to conform to the accepted standards was overwhelming.

He wanted neither more nor less out of life. He was good at whatever he did, better than good enough, but never smashingly outstanding. Thus he could associate himself with and hero worship a Scott both at the same time. He belonged. He too, had once scored the winning touchdown. World War II had seen him achieve a Captaincy of artillery with a year's service in the Pacific, in which his behaviour had been exemplary. He had returned, undecorated and untarnished, popular with his company, cool enough under fire, a man who had done everything an undistinguished soldier should, because he could not have dared be anything either less, or more.

Jane was well aware that by his marriage to her he was certain he had taken the cup in the Conformity Stakes. And because she was a thoroughbred herself and a good sport, she had played the game his way and managed a not too unhappy marriage in which perhaps her greatest achievement had been to conceal from Richard Shelby for twenty years, the fact that he had been found out.

But now the suppressed resentments of those two decades were brought to bursting point by the bald production of the pattern. He was offering to remain behind, not because he had been stricken by the loss of his son, but because it was the right and proper gesture.

In her anguish, she was like a receiving set vibrating and tuning into the wavelength of every emotion. She felt the impatience of the others in the party. Her fate, her dilemma, her person or what happened to her was not really any of their concern. She had become an obstacle and a nuisance like fat Mrs Rosen, who was threatening their chances of survival. She knew her husband wanted to conform to their wishes too, and to Scott's leadership.

Belle said, 'We shouldn't go without the boy. For my part I wouldn't care if we didn't take another step. To me it all sounds crazy -- up, down -- down, up. When the boat sinks we'll all be going the same way.'

'I don't see what could have happened to the little feller,' said Manny Rosen. 'I didn't hear nothing in the dark when the rush came, if he called out, maybe. But if he got tramp . . . I mean, knocked down, maybe we would have . . .' He trailed off lamely, knowing that with each word he was making it worse.

It was the not knowing! Had she found him dead, Jane could have mourned him as those already crushed, lacerated and drowned beneath them would be mourned. But if he were still amongst the living, alone, terrified, blundering about in some pitch black, inverted corridor, or store space, or fallen down one of those awful wells . . .

Nonnie went to her, took her hand and said, 'Oh, Mrs Shelby, we don't want to leave you!'

And Muller added, 'We do understand bow you must feel.'

Martin said, 'Maybe we ought to have another look.'

And Miss Kinsale put in, 'Yes I do think we should.'

Rogo said, 'I wouldn't know where, unless he got picked up by people trying to make it up to the bow. They wouldn't turn back for him and he wouldn't have been able to go it alone.'

Linda said, 'It's her own fault. Why didn't she stick with the kid?'

For all of the beastliness of the remark, Jane knew that it was true. She ought never to have listened to him, never have given in to the squeamishness that same conformity had instilled into her boy.

Racked, Jane felt the falsity behind all their protestations. The little dancing girl might be sincere; the rest of them wanted to get on. She had felt it herself, the urgency to climb up and out while there was still time, to survive where so many had died, the triumph of each little victory, the terrible suspense of the crippled ship. But her rage flooded towards her husband.

Scott was honest. 'Dick, it will have to be your decision. I have pledged myself to go on with these people. They've trusted me. We will leave you your torches and one of the big lanterns but remember, they won't last for ever. If I didn't feel that the boy was safe or that we'd find him in the end, I would never suggest . . .'

'Naturally,' said Shelby, 'I shall remain with my wife.' Suddenly-grown-up Susan seemed to herself to be standing on one side, observing. Lost Robin, harrowed mother, sacrificing father! And who was asking Susan whether she wished to live or die, for which of two forlorn hopes she might care to opt? And in her nostrils was the scent of break-up, of the final explosion of the undercurrent she had divined.